As noted on the Steam Users' Forums, a new patch is now available for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Bethesda's recently released RPG sequel (thanks Chris and Alex). As stated in the thread, one of the changes the patch implements is that the game can no longer be launched separately from Steam. A locked thread on the Bethesda Softworks Forums and another current thread discuss another consequence of the patch, which is that it means the game can no longer be hacked to run in Large Address Aware mode, which many users found was the solution to crashing issues and texture corruption problems. We contacted both Bethesda and Valve about whether we should expect a return of the ability to use large address awareness through a future update, but have not yet received a response.

theyarecomingforyou wrote on Nov 22, 2011, 08:27:I see a lot of people complaining about the game breaking LAA support but a lot of the criticism seems to be aimed at the 2GB restriction of 32bit processes, when in fact Skyrim typically uses about 1GB of RAM - no doubt due to the optimisations made for consoles. If LAA reduces the number of crashes then it isn't because the game is coming across the RAM ceiling.

A common misconception regarding moving to 64bit (or anything beyond 32bit memory addressing schemes) is that programs have more memory to play around with. While that's true, the biggest and most immediate benefit a programmer gains, even with less than 4GB, 2GB or much smaller amount of system memory, is large addressing space that virtually eliminates the problem of virtual address fragmentation that could prevent the program from allocating new memory (and subsequently crashing if not handled properly).

If Skyrim only uses 1GB memory but prone to crash that could be solved with large addresses, then it might be running into fragmentation issue.